


Super!Market

by DeathByFluteConcerto



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Even heroes need to eat, Everyone is as dramatic as possible, Gen, Grocery Shopping, Grocery shopping shenanigans, Humor, Shenanigans, basically a longform shitpost, just because I said so, oh well it was fun, what did i even write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:23:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7278847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathByFluteConcerto/pseuds/DeathByFluteConcerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers go grocery shopping. Hey, even heroes need food. It goes...poorly?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Super!Market

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prufrocking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrocking/gifts).



> This is the MCU Civl War team because that's the most recent thing I've seen. As such, there are minor spoilers for civil war, mostly joke plot tie-ins, but be aware.

Natasha had had quite enough, thanks. 

“But Mr. Stark said it’s high in protein! And he said a high protein snack will keep my brain—” 

“I don’t care what Tony said.” Natasha growled. She fantasized about various ways in which one could subtly murder a teenage boy with a bundle of beets. “Put. Them. BACK.” 

Peter looked between her and the shopping cart glumly. He had a jar of Skippy in one hand, and a jar of Jif in the other. There were a dozen more of each brand in the cart. Not to mention equivalent jars of Laura Schudder’s, Planter’s, Peter Pan, Smuckers, Adam’s, and several more Natasha was reasonably sure had been summoned from another plane of existence—was that Starlord peanut butter? Where had that come from? What fresh hell was this, that she had to bargain with a teenage boy to remove a hundred jars of astral peanut butter from his shopping cart? 

Natasha just wanted to make a salad for dinner. Her hand tightened around the beets she had grabbed from the produce section before she had spotted Peter attempting to bankroll an ill-advised peanut butter dependency with government money. She decided that there were thirty-seven ways in which one could murder a teenage boy with a beet. Only six of them were subtle, but she minded the idea of ostentatious beet slaughter less and less. Natasha was fairly certain that once you had grandiosely and gorily murdered someone with a beet, no one tried to fuck with you in the grocery store any more. And that was an appealing thought. 

“But Mr. Stark—“ 

“Mr. Stark,” Natasha seethed, her tone shutting Peter down with a squeak, “is currently fighting an inanimate object. In a crowded store. With no regard to personal safety or integrity. Do you trust him with your brain?” 

He was, too. They could hear him all the way from the front of the store. There had been several minutes of yelling, which they had both been steadfastly ignoring. 

-

Tony gripped his hands against the edge of the inanimate object in question. He was not crying. He was NOT CRYING. 

“ _Unexpected item in bagging area_ ” the machine chirped impassively. “ _Please remove item and wait for assistance._ ”

“I scanned everything,” he moaned. “I SCANNED EVERYTHING.” It was now a scream. “YOU GODDAMNED MACHINE EVERYTHING THAT IS THERE I TOLD YOU ABOUT.” 

Ignoring the stares of passerby, Tony heaved a sigh and tried to gather his composure, which, usually so carefully held, was now shattered in pieces around him. When he got home, he was going to design a self-checkout machine. It would include a comfy chair, Jarvis’s’ voice, and a FUCKING WORKING SCANNER. 

Tony reached for the pack of energy drinks resting in the bagging area; the last thing he had set down before his own personal hell had been realized in this machine. With the trembling delicacy only a carefully controlled rage could bring, he picked the pack up and set it down again slowly. He definitely did not send a single, fleeting prayer heavenward. Tony would notice momentarily that he was holding his breath. 

The machine was quiet for a moment, as though thinking. Tony was about to exhale. 

“ _Unexpected item in bagging area. Please remove item and wait for assistance._ ” 

“GOD-FUCKING-DAMN-THIS-FUCK.” Tony screeched. With an unbridled scream of rage, he kicked the machine. His eyes stung. He WAS NOT crying. “THIS IS BENEATH ME! YOU ARE A FUCKING SELF CHECKOUT! I AM A GODDAMNED SCIENTIST! I HAVE FOUR DEGREES! I WILL DESIGN A VERSION OF YOU SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY! BECAUSE I CAN! SON OF A FUCKING—“ 

“Wow, you okay there son?” 

“I’M NOT YOUR SON!” Tony whirled to face his new assailant. 

Steve stood behind him, eyebrows raised over clear and piercing blue eyes. He had three bags of chocolate chip cookies gathered in his arms, and a half-eaten one in his hand. He looked like every Midwestern American mother’s fantasy of a son-in-law. Like he’d walked off the front page of a romance novel and into Betty Crocker’s kitchen. Tony wanted to scream even more. 

“THIS—THIS MACHINE! IS! DEFYING! ME!” Tony was screeching again, though he would deny that later. He would, in fact, deny that until the day he died. 

“That so?” Steve chomped down the second half of his cookie and strolled over to the machine with a smirk on his face. He, in point of fact, ambled over to the machine, looking like a man who had not lost a fight in seventy years. Tony was sure that swagger would make women drool, but it just made him broil. With the kind of assurance that can come only from Captain America levels of strength and righteousness, Steve gently lifted the pack of drinks and set them down again. 

Once more, The Machine ruminated. And made a choice. 

“ _Please scan your next item._ ”

Tony moaned and sank to the floor. He would have punched Steve in his handsome face if he could have summoned the energy. Instead, he rested his body against the machine and his face against his hands. 

“How did you do that?” he definitely didn’t whine. He still was definitely not crying, no sir. 

“Guess I just have the magic touch.” Steve chuckled. “Want a cookie?” 

Tony accepted the offered the cookie in silence, chomping defiantly and very carefully not making eye contact. It was fucking delicious. 

“Where did you get these?”

“Bakery department. Belinda gave them to me, said they were a day old and couldn’t sell. I could hear you from all the way over there, you know.” 

“And you didn’t come to help sooner?” Tony asked (and definitely did not huff indignantly). 

“I was enjoying the show. Besides, Belinda was telling about her grandson—he just made the varsity football team and she’s going to the game tonight—“

“I swear you’re closer to those old bakery biddies than you are to us.” Tony grumbled, reaching for another cookie. Steve dodged. 

“Those old bakery biddies, as you refer to them, don’t make scenes at the front of stores, hold up lines, or scare small children.” Steve’s tone was righteous. Was it ever not righteous? Tony tried to think of the last time he and Steve had a conversation where Steve’s tone wasn’t righteous. He couldn’t think of one. 

“I didn’t scare any children.” Tony said, pointedly ignoring the cowering, sobbing toddler behind the neighboring self-checkout machine. He reached for a cookie again. This time he was victorious. “Though, speaking of children, where are our mongrels?” 

“Mongrels?” Steve heaved a sigh. “Peter’s over there, arguing with Natasha over—wow that’s a lot of peanut butter—but I’ve lost track of Wanda and Vision.” 

-

Wanda was hidden, somewhere deep and secret and out of sight. 

To be precise, she was at the back of the snack aisle, which you couldn’t see from the self-checkout machines. She held a package of Disney Princess fruit snacks in one hand, and a pack of Hello Kitty fruit snacks in the other. She was looking back and forth between the pastel pink boxes with great deliberation, her brow furrowed. Whether this was because she was deciding between them or questioning the existence of both, the world might never know. Though, to be fair, the world never really knew when it came to Wanda. Even the narrator doesn't know when it comes to Wanda. 

What? Don’t look at me like that. This woman has caused at least half the problems in the Marvel universe in the past fifteen years. Do you really expect me to know what’s up with her? I mean c’mon. 

Her unreadable deliberations were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a pair of spice jars, which were clasped in a pair of red hands, which phased unceremoniously through the line of Pixar fruit snack boxes next to her. This did not faze Wanda. 

It did faze the straight-haired suburban mom standing next to her, who screamed and went clack-clack-clacking at top speed up the aisle, screaming something about managers. 

A muffled voice came from behind the boxes. Wanda did not even glance up as she responded. 

“Dear, I can’t hear you with your mouth covered.” 

The rest of Vision’s body followed his hands out of the snacks. Despite Peter’s (and Sam’s, and Bucky’s) insistence that it would make people more comfortable, his feet did not touch the ground. The fact that Sam and Bucky agreed on the point made it, in most of the team’s eyes, worth listening to, but Vision persisted. 

He pressed the jars of red spice in his hand down on top of Wanda’s snack boxes, breaking her line of sight. Her eyebrow twitched, but she said nothing. 

“Do we need two of paprika?” Vision queried, voice carefully measured. Too carefully measured. As though he was trying not to give something away. Wanda’s eyes finally left the boxes, flicking up at him briefly before examining the bottles in his hands carefully. 

“No,” she finally replied, hefting the box in her left hand and raising the respective spice. “And this one’s cayenne.” 

“But how?! All visual analysis indicates they are the same!” His voice was frustrated, an impressive feat for an artificial voice. “How come this is paprika, but this is not paprika! Wanda, explain!” 

“Simple. That one’s cayenne.” Wanda said, pulling her fruit snack boxes out from under hands so she could examine them again. 

“Can you at least say that you understand my mistake?” Vision asked, his voice verging on pleading. Those Stark AI voices were really capable of more emotion than one might think was necessary for a robot. 

Wanda fixed him with a piercing stare. 

“You’re an incredibly sophisticated being. You have the literal cosmic embodiment of the mind embedded in your forehead. And you could not sense the difference between paprika and cayenne?” Wanda said. Her voice was monotone, her eyebrows raised. Her tone very clearly implied that Vision was, well, a dense fuck. 

Vision did not have an answer for her. Looking sufficiently abashed, he phased back through the fruit snacks. 

-

As he phased through the wall of soup cans that made up the next aisle, he passed a man who very pointedly did not look at him. The man was wearing sunglasses and a cap pulled low. The man was putting cans into his cart with speed that would have impressed Pietro Maximoff, bless his soul. The man was muttering under his breath. 

“I don’t know these fuckers. I don’t know them I don’t know them I don’t know them.” 

The man was Sam Wilson. 

“I should have gone to Costco. Goddamit. ‘No, thanks Clint, I don’t need that much. You and Scott just grab what you need’.” He muttered. He hadn’t counted on his team acting like, well, his team. Which, in retrospect, was stupid. At least there was no more screaming from the front of the store. But, as Sam well knew, if it wasn’t thing it was a-goddamn-nother. Reflexively, he glanced around the aisle for that one fucker in particular. Seeing that the aisle was empty, he went back to his high speed grocery sweep, snapping items with talon-sharp intensity. He just needed a few basic things. Just a few basic things, for Christ sake. 

-

That one fucker in particular was at the front of the store, in the produce section. Bucky was standing across from a display of plums, staring. He had been staring at them for several minutes. Natasha had been there at first, but she had abandoned him a short time before with a shout of “PETER NO”. Bucky did not know or care why, there were plums to worry about. He had been denied plums last time; they had been unceremoniously torn away from him in the heat of battle. His bag, unjustly taken from him and never returned. Just plums, he just wanted to buy plums. He hesitantly raised a shaking hand, reaching—

And just like that, they were gone. Torn from him again by a cruel twist of fate and a wall of black against his face, the impact like three hundred years of oppression slammed into him all at once. Bucky felt the claws against his back and he knew what this was. 

He and T’challa were about to have a throwdown in the produce section. 

This was not the first time this had happened. Bucky was starting to suspect T’challa had some kind of tracker on him. Two weeks ago, he had been out with Steve, and bam! Throwdown in the bookstore. Ten days ago, he had been trying to put his memories back together and bam! Throwdown in the Smithsonian. Last week, he had been learning about modern America, and bam! Throwdown in the Trump rally. 

The number of places he was banned from was starting to get a little bit ridiculous. 

Bucky threw himself up from the floor and found himself facing T’challa, who had perched catlike on top of a display of lemons. T’challa was wearing his cat suit and everything. Wow. Raising his metal arm to ward off an attack, Bucky narrowed his eyes and tensed his legs against the ground, ready to leap into battle. 

If furry royalty was going to target him for bi-weekly public brawls, he was going to do those brawls right, goddamn it. His life probably couldn’t get any more ridiculous at this point, so why not give it his all? 

Bucky’s furry-fueled zeal was interrupted by the scream of a middle-aged man in a logo-embroidered polo. 

“NO! NO! NO!” The man was shouting. He was tall, white-haired, balding, and unremarkable. His tag proclaimed that he was the Manager, and that his name was Stan. Beside him stood an fuming straight haired woman in impressive heels (considering that this was the grocery store), an indignant woman with a crying toddler in her arms, and another uniform-clad man—a boy really—who was holding several jars of peanut butter and looking very tempted to join the toddler’s hysterics. 

“BANNED! BANNED! ALL OF YOU ARE BANNED! GET OUT OF MY STORE! ALL OF YOU NOW!” 

-

And with that, the motley crew was cast out of the last grocery store in the state of New York that would still let them come in in the first place. They shambled across the parking lot back towards the van, shoulders heavy with shame. Steve’s arms were still laden with cookies, which were passed around disconsolately. Natasha still gripped a sad few beets in her hand. No one had dared take them away from her. She knew she could have magnificently slaughtered Stan the Manager with the beets in exactly 13.67 seconds, but she got the sneaking feeling that might upset Steve. 

“I bet Phil’s team never gets kicked out of stores,” she muttered to herself, “and they don't technically even exist.” 

“What was that?” Steve asked, turning to offer her a cookie. Natasha shook her head. 

“Nothing. Clint and Scott probably had better luck at Costco, let’s hope they bought something edible.” 

Steve nodded and yanked on the door of the van. 

“Hey guys, did it go ok…”

Scott was lying on the van’s first row of seats. Clint was lying on the floor below him. Scott was nursing a blooming black eye, and appeared to be covered in a mixture of nacho cheese and packing peanuts. Clint was asleep with half a pizza on his stomach. He had lost his shirt somehow, and had several teddy bear temporary tattoos plastered across his chest. 

“…I’ll take that as a no.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a tumblr post where I wrote a story in the tags and my BFF Tracy talked me into doing the real thing. I don't know anymore. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
